Did Darwin recant?

Editor’s note: As Creation magazine has been continuously published since 1978, we
are publishing some of the articles from the archives for historical interest, such as this. For teaching and
sharing purposes, readers are advised to supplement these historic articles with more up-to-date ones suggested in the Related Articles below.

Charles Darwin died on 19 April 1882, at the age of 73. To some it was deplorable
that he should have departed an unbeliever, and in the years that followed several
stories surfaced that Darwin had undergone a death-bed conversion and renounced
evolution. These stories began to be included in sermons as early as May 1882.1 However, the best known is
that attributed to a Lady Hope, who claimed she had visited a bedridden Charles
at Down House2 in the autumn
of 1881. She alleged that when she arrived he was reading the Book of Hebrews, that
he became distressed when she mentioned the Genesis account of creation, and that
he asked her to come again the next day to speak on the subject of Jesus Christ
to a gathering of servants, tenants and neighbours in the garden summer house which,
he said, held about 30 people. This story first appeared in print as a 521-word
article in the American Baptist journal, the Watchman Examiner,3 and since then has been reprinted in many books,
magazines and tracts.

The alleged recantation/conversion are embellishments that others have either read
into the story or made up for themselves.

The main problem with all these stories is that they were all denied by members
of Darwin’s family. Francis Darwin wrote to Thomas Huxley on 8 February 1887,
that a report that Charles had renounced evolution on his deathbed was ‘false
and without any kind of foundation’,4
and in 1917 Francis affirmed that he had ‘no reason whatever to believe that
he [his father] ever altered his agnostic point of view’.5 Charles’s daughter Henrietta (Litchfield)
wrote on page 12 of the London evangelical weekly, The Christian, for 23
February 1922, ‘I was present at his deathbed. Lady Hope was not present during
his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case
she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted
any of his scientific views, either then or earlier … . The whole story has
no foundation whatever’.6
Some have even concluded that there was no Lady Hope.

So what should we think?

Photo: Warwick Armstrong

The inscription on the gravestone.

Darwin’s biographer, Dr James Moore, lecturer in the history of science and
technology at The Open University in the UK, has spent 20 years researching the
data over three continents. He produced a 218-page book examining what he calls
the ‘Darwin legend’.7
He says there was a Lady Hope. Born Elizabeth Reid Cotton in 1842, she
married a widower, retired Admiral Sir James Hope, in 1877. She engaged in tent
evangelism and in visiting the elderly and sick in Kent in the 1880s, and died of
cancer in Sydney, Australia, in 1922, where her tomb may be seen to this day.8

Moore concludes that Lady Hope probably did visit Charles between Wednesday, 28
September and Sunday, 2 October 1881, almost certainly when Francis and Henrietta
were absent, but his wife, Emma, probably was present.9 He describes Lady Hope as ‘a skilled raconteur,
able to summon up poignant scenes and conversations, and embroider them with sentimental
spirituality’.10
He points out that her published story contained some authentic details as to time
and place, but also factual inaccuracies—Charles was not bedridden six months
before he died, and the summer house was far too small to accommodate 30 people.
The most important aspect of the story, however, is that it does not say
that Charles either renounced evolution or embraced Christianity. He merely is said
to have expressed concern over the fate of his youthful speculations and to have
spoken in favour of a few people’s attending a religious meeting. The alleged
recantation/conversion are embellishments that others have either read into the
story or made up for themselves. Moore calls such doings ‘holy fabrication’!

It should be noted that for most of her married life Emma was deeply pained by the
irreligious nature of Charles’s views, and would have been strongly motivated
to have corroborated any story of a genuine conversion, if such had occurred. She
never did.

It therefore appears that Darwin did not recant, and it is a pity that to this day
the Lady Hope story occasionally appears in tracts published and given out by well-meaning
people.

Related Articles

References

Down House retained the spelling of the old name of Darwin’s
village, which was changed to Downe in the mid-nineteenth century to avoid confusion
with County Down in Northern Ireland. Source: Ref. 1, p. 176. Return
to text.

Julie I. wrote: “Thank you so much for this site! I am very blessed already. I appreciate you sharing all these helps and resources. Especially the free ones. We are grateful!” Keep the free stuff coming. Support this site

Comments closed

A reader’s comment

M. S.,United Kingdom, 31 May 2012

If Darwin did not recant, then why is he buried at Westminster Abbey?

Tas Walker responds

It was a strategic move on the part of his atheistic/agnostic supporters to advance the public acceptance of evolution. (See "Darwin's death and the Abbey" in this article.)